Introduction to Basic Programming

This web book is the result of several years of introductory R courses. It contains work of my colleagues:

  • Daniela Manzato, who wrote the first version of this book,
  • Enrico Pegoraro, who wrote chapters about statistical modeling,
  • Veronica Giro and Nicola Sturaro, which reviewed and reassembled all these materials.

However, it would not have been possible without the sharing of knowledge, information, ideas, doubts and even criticisms of many individuals on the internet. I would like to extend my sincere thanks to all of them.

I am grateful to Bill Venables and John Chambers for their publications on R that provided solid foundations to my knowledge on this subject. Moreover Quick R often provides some useful ready-to-cook recipe.

I would finally like to express my special gratitude to Hadley Wickham for providing and sharing his research on the R packages: dplyr and ggplot2. Without his contribution, a part of this manual would never have been written.

I finally express my sincere excuses to all researchers and R enthusiasts I have borrowed any knowledge from without mentioning them. This was not intentional, simply I had not always tracked my sources. If this is the case, please contact me directly and I will be more than happy to include any appropriate reference in this manual.

Andrea Spanò,
Quantide s.r.l.